


even the dreadful martyrdom (a thousand times remembered)

by omphale23



Category: due South
Genre: Challenge fic, M/M, dsmatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:05:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finds that memory and history are rarely the same, are in fact shifting definitions of a single experience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	even the dreadful martyrdom (a thousand times remembered)

**Author's Note:**

> &gt; Thanks to [](http://nos4a2no9.livejournal.com/profile)[**nos4a2no9**](http://nos4a2no9.livejournal.com/), [](http://brigantine1.livejournal.com/profile)[**brigantine1**](http://brigantine1.livejournal.com/), and [](http://bertybertle.livejournal.com/profile)[**bertybertle**](http://bertybertle.livejournal.com/) for their excellent beta help, and to the rest of Team Angst for character notes, suggestions, and general commiseration.

** it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,  
but you cannot stand in the middle of this**

\--Marianne Moore

***

Ray won't answer the phone; Francesca claims not to know where he spent the night.

*

 

_In the middle of a midnight Mass, Ray hunches over tying the laces on his new shoes. He fights to keep his eyes open through hymns and homily and candles lit and flickering. _

He can see his breath as they walk home. His baby sister is asleep on his father's shoulder and Ray carries the key to the front door in his hand, edges pressing into his fingers.

*

 

He wakes still shaking. Vibrating with anger, tremors in his hands and his chest. The sort of impotent rage that nothing quiets, that makes it clear he is no less fallible than the criminals he arrests.

*

 

_On Sunday afternoons everyone creeps around the house. They don't have guests, don't watch television or play the radio or stay around the table laughing after dinner. Ray sits in his room and throws pennies at the ceiling. He's praying under his breath and listening for the stuttering silences that mean he's screwed up, been too loud or too mouthy or too tall. Too much child for such a small space._

*

 

He finds that memory and history are rarely the same, are in fact shifting definitions of a single experience.

*

 

_They're fighting in the kitchen, screaming about Frannie's roller skates and Maria's magazines, Ray's dishes in the sink. Pop rages in with a pair of baseball bats to throw on the linoleum._

When he shouts at them to take a swing and get it over with, kill each other, everyone stops.

*

 

Fraser makes a leap of faith.

*

 

_He breaks an arm falling down the stairs, says his rosary counting the stitches inside his lip, knows how much harder it would be to explain if he didn't have any practice._

*

 

He won't turn away first, stands tall and hopes. Love is difficult to kill and he refuses to be driven away so easily, not when he's learned to hold on to a person instead of a place. Ray falls silent, turning a battered key over in his hands before snapping it down on the table. There's only one thing left to do.

*

 

_His sisters learn to keep their heads down, have whispered phone conversations while Pop snores on the couch. Frannie's growing up too fast and Ray's not sure what to do about that. He knows he'll have to stick around to watch her, keep her out of trouble._

*

 

They argue about it for days, Ray growing increasingly exasperated, as Fraser stumbles over the words. He speaks in circles, goes home to an empty apartment and unlit candles.

*

 

_On his seventeenth birthday, he finds a set of car keys next to his pancakes. His Ma smiles at him, nods at the door, and Ray isn't really that hungry anyway._

*

 

Ray says it's not his fault, they aren't enough. Fraser wants to argue but how can he prove this equation, fit the pieces together into something inescapable? All he knows is that he could give up his home to make this work, but Ray? Ray has something he won't let go.

*

 

_Ray tells Frankie no. He talks about Irene, the way she looks on a Sunday night, hair up with a pencil twisted through to hold it in place, grinning at him over a magazine. Ray tells Frankie that he's in love, and Irene is the one he sees when he closes his eyes._

*

 

Ray learns to hold back by watching Fraser. They both regret it.

*

 

_Years later, Frankie sends a gift to the wedding but doesn't ever meet Ange. Ray pretends he doesn't notice._

*

 

There are days when he keeps his hands clenched tightly behind his back, tendons straining against the urge to grab at Ray's collar, drag their mouths together, draw blood. Days when all he needs is to feel grounded in this place he hates with a man he loves.

Those are the days that Ray untangles him from his uniform, lays him out and reminds him that they are more than duty.

*

 

_Ray wishes for rain. Cold and damp and a real goodbye. What he gets is afternoon sun and golden warmth. He gets leaves rustling in the trees and the smell of cut grass. He gets the kind of day that requires sunglasses, gets birds singing and the dull hum of traffic outside the gates. Standing next to the coffin, tall and straight and present, holding his family up, Ray hopes for a sudden downpour._

*

 

They argue. Ray is sharp, sarcastic, itching for some sort of fight. And Fraser is careful not to give it to him, papering over the edges of their conversations with anecdotes and misapprehensions that are both completely accurate and desperately dishonest.

*

 

_Christ knows he never got along with his father when he was alive. Still, those first few months after he walked from the graveyard, conscience clean and requiems sung, the sudden ache of it hits him like a punch. Like stumbling away from Frankie in the tenth grade, waiting for another hit, tasting blood between his teeth._

*

 

He doesn't understand how Ray can laugh so easily, as if there's nothing behind it. Laughter should be saved, kept for moments that really deserve happiness. Offering it to strangers tempts fate, offends the gods.

*

 

_Frannie waits until Pop dies before she gets divorced. She's smarter than she looks._

*

 

He discovers that without distance every word needs to count, sentences must be precise. There's no room for ignoring the flaws of language, nowhere to escape accusations whispered or questions half asked. This is sometimes a comfort, but more often not.

*

 

_One time. One time Ray hits Frannie. He doesn't mean to do it, just strikes out blindly and his fist is moving before he's even thought to swing. She ducks, long years of practice even though Pop would never, ever hit a woman, but she's too close to get away._

He can't stop apologizing when he hands over the ice. Frannie swats him in the arm, but he opens doors for her and brings home candy and bites his tongue when she teases him.

*

 

Ray slides into the booth across from him, runs his fingers over the silverware, unfolds a napkin, slouches with a cup of coffee in his hand. Fraser licks his lip, defeated.

*

 

_He never gets drunk again. All he needs to stop is the memory of her eyes, absolutely furious. The whiskey turns to ash, he coughs instead of swallows._

*

 

Sometimes all he really needs is a simple answer. He almost never gets one.

*

 

_The first night, Ray doesn't knock. He just walks in, no lights, no greeting. By the time Fraser shifts in the bed, tense and unsure, he's inches from a touch, hand hovering warm just above the blanket. Neither of them looks away. Neither of them admits that their fingers shake._

*

 

Ray stops him at the car, pulls Fraser into an alley and shoves him hard against the bricks. Fraser relaxes into the kiss, takes it for what it is and doesn't try for caution. He ignores the traffic rushing past, the screech of brakes and shock of obscenities just out of view.

*

 

_Ray pushes, Fraser pulls. They end up sprawled across the bed, Fraser's hands sliding up Ray's ribcage, Ray's hands pulling at Fraser's hair. In the morning they both have bruises, dark fingerprints on Fraser's hip, the ghostly echoes of teeth along Ray's spine._

They don't apologize. Ray learns to wear his collars buttoned.

*

 

He's never been any good at keeping people. Ray brings him trinkets, things he doesn't need, and Fraser isn't sure of the reason. He learns to dread them, senses that they symbolize an instability, something gone wrong.

It's his own fault. For not asking why. He assumes that they're offered because Ray has seen him, the way he is wary, careful with a gift. Cautious in a way he never manages with his body, gestures, people, love.

*

 

_They never had extra as kids and gifts held too much meaning, enough to drown out a slap, a scream, a choked whimper in the dark. Frannie sees through it, hears an apology for something he hasn't done yet, an effort to fix what he hasn't yet broken. Fraser doesn't speak this language of ribbon-wrapped guilt._

*

 

He smells rain on the wind. For Ray it's new life, warm days and heat and escape from crowded rooms. Fraser keeps for himself the memory of thaw, the loss of runners on snow and cold open spaces.

*

 

_He's not a kid anymore and Ray likes to think that, faced with the choice between gifts and honesty, he'd offer honesty. But he still stops and buys little things, tokens that Fraser carefully locks in a trunk and never questions._

*

 

After their first fight Ray drives south, miles and miles of gunmetal clouds until the city slips beneath the horizon. Surrounded by fields, snow in drifts and nothing but the occasional dark streak of pavement to break the monotony, for a moment Fraser can taste home.

*

 

_They're almost caught. Ray's head falls back against the door, and there's the rattle of the handle, Frannie's voice asking if they need help. _

Fraser's laugh brushes against Ray's collarbone.

*

 

He learns to lock his door, offers Ray a key without thinking. He's trying to get this right. Ray jumbles this key in with the rest. He still doesn't knock.

*

 

_Fraser brings him a St. Christopher medal, talks of the protector of bachelors and those far from home, carefully ignores lost sainthood. Ray wears it a few days. He takes it off when he catches Frannie watching, eyes narrowed as she taps one fingernail on the edge of the kitchen counter._

*

 

For Fraser, home is always a place. Ray maintains that home is a family. They can never seem to make those statements true at the same time.

*

 

_Fraser mutters under his breath, and that's how Ray knows he's angry. It echoes like Ange's shocked whisper when he forgot his wedding ring, a disbelieving, "You lost it _where_?"_

He offers to replace it with something his family won't notice, and Fraser walks out.

*

 

The symbols matter. He can't explain it to Ray, eventually falls silent. He wears a piece of a faith he doesn't have, and he can't decide if he's being ridiculous or romantic.

Ray never mentions it, but Fraser wakes sometimes to fingers tangled in the chain around his neck, Ray's voice washing over him in ancient cadences, poems of supplication.

*

 

_His mother deserves to know. She already does, maybe, whispers during Saturday night confession and fending him off with casserole and coffee on Sundays when he gears up for the truth. She won't ask when he stopped wearing a crucifix._

*

 

He buys them from the tiny shop on the corner. Two martyrs, sides of the same sanctified coin. The stories calm him when he wraps one and later offers it to Ray. Context, he decides, is everything.

*

 

_These days, Fraser sits next to Frannie at meals, nervous and quiet and never looking up from his plate. Ray's the only one who knows that under his uniform is an image of St. Sebastian. He can't predict how long they'll be able to keep it that way._

*

 

He thinks he needs redemption. Victoria gives him penance and that might be sufficient.

*

 

_Ray finally figures it out, the reason his mother never left. She needed something of her own, someone to come home at night and see her first. He watches Fraser sleep and thinks about what he'd be willing to sacrifice._

*

 

Fraser hates telling the story of how he came to Chicago. Someday he'll learn, choose a summary that tells nothing at all while seeming to say everything. Until that day, he flinches with guilt and fumbles for the words, the right language to describe an ending without a beginning.

*

 

_Ma tells stories to fill potential silences, sentences that nobody cares about that ramble on and only trail off when Ray sighs and leans back, takes another cookie. She hugs them too hard when they leave, is always asleep when Ray comes home early on a Monday morning._

*

 

His father went back for a tattered wallet.

Even if he didn't know it at the time, the story makes a difference, is a gift left to excuse an absence. It colors everything Fraser thought he knew, all the grudges he didn't hold. His life reshuffles into a new pattern, and he thinks that yes, maybe he could ask for more.

*

 

_He was happy to learn Ange snored and worries that Fraser doesn't. Ray's uneasy that he won't know if Fraser's asleep without seeing his face, being within reach._

*

 

Fraser doesn't measure the years he's been alone when he's out on the trail. Instead, he counts backwards, ticking off the losses in order. Victoria. His grandmother, his grandfather. Mark. His home. His mother.

It's terribly morbid, but it helps bring sleep when nothing else brings comfort.

*

 

_Pop threw Frannie's record player out a window. Ray's never been big on music, but he puts up with it because Fraser gets a look in his eyes, soft and quiet and remembering. Ray keeps meaning to ask what he's thinking but he forgets._

*

 

He's certain he lost his father first, and no stilted attempts at holiday phone conversations will convince him otherwise. He suspects his mother might have agreed.

*

 

_Ma says that she understands, that mothers always love their kids no matter what they choose. But she cries when they tell her and Ray is sure that she offers extra prayers for his soul, asks the priest what she did wrong in raising him. He's always been the one she could lean on. Novenas are an incomplete comfort._

She won't look Fraser in the eye, because she loves them both but they're damned. There's no way around that.

*

 

His father promised that they'd go hunting in the fall, camping together out beyond the lights of town. When he sends a message, two words on a torn scrap of paper that explains everything and nothing with a scribbled _Duty calls_, Ben sets off on his own.

*

 

_Fraser tells stories sometimes, long after the lamp goes out and the cacophony of the traffic fades. They all involve men doing great things, adventures and peril and sometimes death in the wilderness. None of them question the reasons for the voyage, or mention the people left at home to wait._

*

 

He can't divide what he remembers of his mother from what he's been told. He hears his grandmother, singing in a language he can't understand, long after he is meant to be asleep. The memory hurts, but not as much as it ought.

*

 

_Fraser asks him quietly how long it's been going on, how long it's been since Ray loved him. Ray lies and says, "Long enough." _

He glances past Fraser's neck, stares at the window, reaches for a talisman that isn't there.

When Fraser leans in for a goodbye kiss, Ray flinches.

*

 

** But come. Grief must have its term? Guilt too, then.  
And it seems there is no limit to the resourcefulness of recollection.**

\--James Fenton

 

**


End file.
